Friday, April 25, 2008

My 2 cents is that this feature won't be particularly useful for the next decade or so. Judging from Microsoft's approach to things like opacity, I wouldn't expect to see IE implementing this until *after* it becomes part of the CSS spec.

In one sentence: Javascript 1.8 (supported by Firefox 3) has many of Python's features, but is a Frankenstein's patchwork of so many languages it might achieve the highest maintenance costs a language other that PERL has ever seen.

Monday, April 21, 2008

Dion Almaer talks about RDBMS, ODBMS and Google's App engine. It's an interesting discussion, and it touches on line between the academic world and the business world: RDBMS is the de facto standard for data storage in business, but will it stay so, in the face of all the alternatives that are popping up?

My bet is that in the end, SQL will win. There are too many SQL-driven behemoths out there, and for the ordinary teenage learner, SQL tools (via PHP, or Visual Studio or whatever) are widely available and are very easy to play with.

Nonetheless, I'd like to see some more dissemination for these alternative data storage models, so that their patterns become more apparent, and so that they can ultimately be standardized (even if only loosely by de facto usage)

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

There’s something profoundly other about Macs—for many of us, they’re objects of craftsmanship rather than just tools. You don’t need to do anything other than go into an Apple Store and see how people behave around them to get that. Then, just for contrast’s sake, take a stroll down to Best Buy, and see how people treat the computers there.

Saturday, April 12, 2008

If you've done even a little bit of web development, you've probably had to write some sort of html-escaping script before to avoid html injection scenarios (when outputting user-generated content to a page, most likely). It probably looks something like the following (in javascript):

What happens here is that you can call any function as a method of any object, as long as the first parameter of the function is of the same type as the object you're "attaching" it to. Obviously, you omit the first parameter in the actual list of parameters when calling functions this way. It looks very Ruby-like in this example, and it can make code pretty clean-looking. Take this snippet for example:

From a glance over the wiki, John seems to have done quite a bit of research on minimizing interferences such as rendering loading times, so this should be a easy place to go whenever you want to pitch the latest version of your favorite browser against other browsers and compare their javascript engine speeds.

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Of particular interest is the ".note" test. I just wish they added benchmarks on more practical queries like ".class tag" or ".class .class". They do have "tag.class tag.class", but since the optimum algorithms for these queries is somewhat different (especially in less capable browsers), I think those cases are all relevant.

Another thing that is worth pointing out is that library authors could put a bit more effort in testing in IE6. There are way too many tests with inconsistent number of elements returned. It's true that "p:nth-child(even)" isn't a very realistic test, but "div + p" and "div:not(.example)" are not that far fetched.

Anyways, did anyone notice that the legend at the bottom is broken in IE6? :)